Voice activated service (VAS) offerings often employ some technique for providing requestors with interactive and voice-based access to information. One relatively common technique involves an interactive voice response (IVR) application. A typical IVR application includes software for accepting voice telephone inputs or touch-tone keypad selections from a requestor. In response, the application may provide the requestor with responsive information and/or effectuate a requestor command.
The goal of many IVR and IVR-like solutions is often to reduce the number of low value-add calls handled by actual agents. In theory, automating common interactions may provide an enhanced level of requestor satisfaction while reducing the average cost per call. In practice, many organizations presenting VAS offerings find the available VAS platforms to be ineffectual.
While speech recognition technologies have assisted in making traditional IVR applications more requestor-friendly, these solutions often require proprietary software, hardware, and interfaces—increasing implementation costs and tightly coupling the organization deploying the technology with the organization supplying the technology. This combined with complex integration requirements and limited interoperability has helped make application development costly, slow, and rigid.